Helen Macdonald

H Is for Hawk

H Is for Hawk Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize Bestseller in the UK A Guardian and Economist Best Book of the YearWhen Helen Macdonald s father died suddenly on a London street she was devastated An exper

Title: H Is for Hawk

Author: Helen Macdonald

ISBN: null

Page: 267

Format: Kindle Edition

Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize 1 Bestseller in the UK A Guardian and Economist Best Book of the YearWhen Helen Macdonald s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated An experienced falconer, Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood but she d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk But in h Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize 1 Bestseller in the UK A Guardian and Economist Best Book of the YearWhen Helen Macdonald s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated An experienced falconer, Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood but she d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H White s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor Projecting herself in the hawk s wild mind to tame her tested the limits of Macdonald s humanity and changed her life.Heart wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer s eccentric falconry Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

About The Author

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, historian, illustrator and naturalist She s worked as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, as a professional falconer, and in raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia She is an affiliate of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge She lives in Suffolk, UK.

754 Comment

H is for HawkThis is Mabel. She is a goshawk. I didn’t know what a goshawk was before I started to read this book. I wasn’t actually sure I knew what a hawk was either. “Seriously, Greg? You are forty years old and you don’t know what a hawk is?”Well, sort of. I knew that it is a bird and that it is a predatory animal. I had no idea what one looked like. If you showed me pictures of some birds and told me to pick out the hawk and you had some falcons and maybe some non-bald eagles I wo [...]

Didn't rate this at all. I have to be blunt here. H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald is not my cup of tea in the slightest. To say it won the Costa Book of the Year and to be given widespread praise and five-star reviews by many including being labelled as a ‘soaring triumph’ by the Telegraph, I expected something better, something much much better.To say that I didn’t rate it highly is something of an understatement. Yes, there is some pretty prose on the pages, but even some of this seems [...]

A is for AscendantProse to sweep you awayB is for BirdsWith a passion for preyC is for CambridgeShe’s one of their scholarsD is for DineroNice royalty dollarsE is for ElegiacSo sad when her dad diedF is for FlyingBird and soul, side by sideG is for GratefulSusan, you pointed the wayH is for HawkA great book, I must sayOK, you get the idea. This one is beautifully written, scholarly, a bit sad, and ultimately uplifting. It’s been quite a success, too, both at the bookstores and with critics. [...]

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.Helen MacDonald had suffered a great loss. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote,Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Perhaps the same might be applied to grieving. I know for myself, during an acute period of grieving I was practicall [...]

Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’.Here’s another word: raptor, meaning ‘bird of prey’. From the Latin raptor, meaning ‘robber,’ from rapere meaning ‘seize’. Rob. Seize.Here’s another word: Captivating. H is for Hawk stole me, holding me captive with its madness and love. Part claustrophobic memoir of grief, part luminous tribute to the sport of falconry, Helen Macdonald’s [...]

I certainly would not want to dissuade anyone from reading H is for Hawk, Cambridge professor Helen Macdonald's moving memoir of coping with the loss of her photojournalist father. Her twin academic disciplines of English and ornithology (specifically, falconry) provide the source of her occasionally gorgeous prose as she recounts her attempt at raising a goshawk. If she'd focused more on herself, her birding, and her subsequent descent into near-madness, this would've been a solid four-star rea [...]

This is gorgeous nature writing and it is also a graceful memoir about bereavement. Helen Macdonald has managed to blend the two genres beautifully. When Helen's father died, her grief was so great that she decided to adopt a goshawk. Helen had loved hawks since childhood and had studied falconry, but this was her first time trying to train a goshawk.In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecoats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, [...]

“The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.""I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me.""Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all.”"I’d brought the hawk into my world and then I pretended I lived in hers. [...]

"The archeology of grief is not ordered."Helen Macdonald’s book-length nonfiction is so many things at once: a eulogy, an elegy, a biography, a memoir, a training manual, a journey. It is a conversation about death, and community. It is so filled with passion and pain that one reads, breath bated, to see which will crush the other. This book is only partly about a hawk, despite the title. It records the author’s journey of a few years, starting with the unexpected death of her father, throug [...]

In an original blend of memoir, biography and nature writing, Macdonald reveals how raising Mabel the goshawk helped her heal after her father’s sudden death. Throughout, Macdonald compares her own falconry experience to that of T.H. White, who, in the 1930s, was a lonely schoolteacher at Stowe – and a closeted homosexual with sadistic tendencies. Macdonald recognizes the ways in which, for White, too, flying a hawk was a means of exploring one’s own wild depths and testing the links betwe [...]

I remember seeing this book on the shelves in the bookstore a year or so ago and picked it up because I thought maybe it was a rad new historical fiction about a hawk. I confess that when I initially saw it was a memoir, I put it down, uninterested. I typically am not interested in memoirs unless you are, like, Dr Salk and literally cured polio or something. But I am SO GLAD other Rioters had talked this book up so much because this is seriously one of the most beautiful books I have read in a l [...]

This is probably a decent book and several of my smarty-farty friends have read it, but we all know I'm a moron and every time it is spammed recommended to me on my feed I can only picture this . . . .^^^^^Now that book I would totally read.

H is for Hawk could be H is for Hope or Heart or Home as all of these capture in some small way the essence of this beautiful book. When Helen Macdonald’s father dies, she finds herself inconsolable in her grief. In an effort to heal her soul and regain a connection with her father she sets out to find and train a hawk. Not just any hawk, a Goshawk. And here is just one of the beauties of her story. The descriptions of her Goshawk, Mabel, are so vivid that I can see her in all her regal glory. [...]

I appear to be one of the few people who didn't enjoy this book. It has won awards and received universal critical acclaim. It is an autobiographical account of a Cambridge academic's descent into depression after the death of her father. In order to heal herself she drives to Scotland to buy a goshawk and proceeds to train it. The hawk, named Mabel, lives in her spare room in Cambridge and is taken out into the countryside to hunt. MacDonald describes her depression and her growing relationship [...]

Helen Macdonald is a college English teacher who goes into a tailspin after the death of her father. She works her way out of her grief by taking up the challenging task of mastering and training a goshawk. She had the experience of working with smaller, more common hawks in her youth, but goshawks are big and notoriously unruly. In this process she reads about a beginner’s efforts chronicled in T.H.White’s book from the early 30’s when he was a young teacher at a boarding school. Instead [...]

I generally don't do memoirs, but not because I'm a snob for everything else. I don't do them because I'm not really interested. A bit more oddly, I'm only mildly interested in hawks and falcons. I certainly never went out of my way to learn more after reading Stephen King's The Gunslinger, so why am I going out of my way now?Mostly, it's because of the writing. I heard from several sources that it was good and I stayed as a low blip in my radar for quite some time, but then, finally Ilana tippe [...]

"Breeding goshhawks isn't for the faint-hearted." "Human hands are for holding other hands. They are not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out of necks out onto leaf-litter while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry's chest cavity" . Falconry is not pet keeping. We learn just how time consuming it must be-- --the dedication -the passion it takes to even appreciate the depths of 'the sport''the art'.'the meditation'. Helen Macdonald is also a writer - a [...]

This review first appeared on my blog, Shoulda Coulda Woulda Books.…And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure, that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken a flight to a place from w [...]

I do not read enough non-fiction. When I come to a book like this one, it makes me wonder why. Helen Macdonald has written a marvelous chronicle of her journey from grief to acceptance, achieved through the training of a goshawk. When Helen loses her father, she loses her stability. He has been her friend and mentor, and in many ways she has patterned her life after his. The loss seems insurmountable. Having a background in and love of falconry, she decides to get a goshawk from a breeder in Ire [...]

4.5I normally don't go near a 'Misery Memoir'. And I know exactly how it feels to lose a much loved father. Do I really want to read about someone else's loss?However, this book is astonishing.It's hard to describe - in fact whilst I was reading it I tried to explain to a friend and fellow book lover what it was all about, and the words just wouldn't come. I know I won't do it justice.I'll try again - it's a non fiction book about a woman, a Cambridge academic and falconer, who spirals into grie [...]

I’m definitely in the minority with this one. It has received almost universal acclaim, rave reviews and won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. But I found it tedious and I just couldn’t engage with it at all. An amalgam of nature writing, memoir and literary history, the impetus for writing it came from Helen Macdonald’s extreme grief at the sudden death of her father, to whom she was very close. In a strange sort of identification, she bought and trained a goshawk, Mabel. Mab [...]

Haunting, Poignant Account of Grief and FalconryMemoirs Are Not Usually My Cup of TeaI usually avoid memoirs. You know, the Hollywood celebrity tell-alls. I'm just not interested. (I made an exception for Patti Smith and Alan Cumming, but then, those were not celebrity gossip memoirs at all, but much more personal ones. And both of those people feel like kindred spirits.)A Very Different Kind of MemoirThis book is a memoir, but in a very different vein.The Death of Helen's FatherIt's a very pers [...]

I didn't know what to expect from this book, despite having read the summary and several glowing reviews. It seemed to have an odd premise, added to that I'm not a huge fan of reading non fiction, nor do I have an interest in birds of prey. Nonetheless, I was intrigued and grabbed a copy, and I'm glad I did. The story itself is not so much about hawks, as it is about Macdonald dealing with grief and finding a reason to get up in the morning. This was, for me, not unputdownable, however, I immedi [...]

"If birds are made of air, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost. It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In her breathtaking new book, “H Is for Hawk,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice thei [...]

I haven’t recently experience a great loss in my life, I’ve never read T.H. White’s The Goshawk, and I knew nothing about hawking, but something about H is for Hawk always appealed to me. When it was first published a few years back it was the book that I met with frequently in the bookshop and had a flirtatious, but never financially binding, relationship. By year’s end the book made an appearance on many best-of lists, but it still remained a book I always intended to read. Many a read [...]

I may be one of the few people who didn't love this book. A more accurate rating for me would be 2.5 stars. I was very excited to read this memoir by Helen Macdonald as I am a birder and was drawn to the idea that the author turned to raising a goshawk as a way to channel her grief over the sudden death of her father. The book starts off promisingly, and much of the language is lyrical and just beautiful to read. However, I found myself less and less interested while reading -- to the point wher [...]

When a friend extolled the virtues of H is for Hawk, nothing about it sounded particularly appealing. Falconry? To me, the subject is a big yawn. T.H. White? Certainly T.H. White is a brilliant author, but Arthurian legend The Once and Future King is not the kind of book I gravitate to. So why, then, am I so sure that H is for Hawk will not only land on my list of the best books I read this year, but also take its place as one of the finest contemporary books I’ve read, period?For me, the answ [...]

Well, that was exhausting to read. So much so, it took me three weeks to complete it, despite it being only 300 pages long. Still, I applaud the author for writing this memoir which was an odyssey of her journey through grief over her beloved father's death. Though sometimes, the journey felt more like an endless cycle of turning in circles or repeatedly having one's liver torn out and eaten like Prometheus. But substitute heart for liver in the author's case because she coped with her overwhelm [...]

This is one of those quiet books that links nature and human grief… without really sentimentalising it. Macdonald trains Mabel (the goshawk) as a way of reconnecting with herself, of dealing with grief about her father’s death, and she writes about that beautifully without ever reducing it to a picture-perfect moment of “nature healing” or something. I actually found it pretty painful to read: recognising some of the grief, the depression; knowing all about that disconnection.I can see w [...]